The amount of media available to users in any given media delivery system can be substantial. However, conventional media systems lack efficient media retrieval methods that take user preferences and technical limitations (e.g., poor bandwidth conditions) into account. Users may be presented with content that they may deem inappropriate. For example, children may be exposed to content with nudity, gore, and explicit language. Even if this content will not be viewed by the user, conventional media systems may further use precious bandwidth to retrieve and generate, for display, the content anyway. Furthermore, conventional media systems may inefficiently buffer content that the user does intend to view, causing chopping, stalling, and poor resolution.